and have a good time Saturday 7/30/17, 7-PM at Sharon’s house!

FCM is a group of your neighbors that promotes community-based media including the Internet, who educate citizens on the media, and who want media to be responsive to the public-interest in their coverage.

FCM is currentlyvery worriedabout that a very few large corporations and money-people want to do away with Internet protections gained under the Obama Administration. This is known as “net neutrality” – or an open-Internet for all.

What do the money-people want to do to the Internet?

Under the Trump Administration, the danger is that a few money-people and large corporations want to make you pay more to access the Internet at a reasonable speed, and probably control what you see or don’t see. They use the name, “The Restoring Internet Freedom” rule where their use of the word “freedom” is really a smokescreen for turning the Internet over to moneyed interests and enacting Internet censorship.

What can ordinary people like us do?

Join the resistance by letting your voice be heard at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) by August 15th with comments on what has been posted on the issue. Almost 10 million already commented to the FCC – most are against dismantling net neutrality – and others are bots from large corporations that are in favor of the new rules.

What can I do and what should I write?

Friends of Community Media already prepared and filed an extensive rebuttal to the new rules on July 17th in a comment to the Federal Communications Commission. When sending in your comments, refer to our comment to the FCC which shows up as:

On Monday 7/17/17 Friends of Community Media filed a comment with the FCC protesting the abolishing of net neutrality regulations. Doing away with these rules, would give major media companies unprecedented authority to raise Internet service providers fees, and power to censor content on an open-Internet. Many thanks to Amy, Gordon, and Spencer for the work they put in to do this!

Kansas City, July 10, 2017 – On Saturday July 15th, Friends of Community Media (FCM) will convene the first of a series of forums on the media at 2:30 PM in the annex-room at 39th and Main (rear door) in Kansas City. This meeting includes a panel with open-media advocate Spencer Graves and (tentatively) Ernesto Falcon, an attorney and Legislative Council with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a citizen’s advocacy group specializing in Internet law, and possibly others. Bring your concerns and questions.

This forum will discuss the efforts of the Federal Communications Commission under the Trump Administration to reverse the 2015 Open Internet rules with a “Notice of proposed rulemaking 17-60A1 on Restoring Internet Freedom”: Trump’s FCC wants to restore the freedom of telecoms like Comcast to censor your internet usage, destroying net neutrality. The “data” justifying this change were cherry-picked, according to the New York Times, FCC Commissioner Clyburn and others.

Recent polls by Mozilla and Civis Analytica found that 76 and 77 percent of Americas support net neutrality. [1]

The forum will encourage citizens and groups to send comments on this proposed change to the FCC before their July 17 deadline and to your representatives in the US House and Senate. Perhaps the easiest way to do this is via “BattleForTheNet.com”.

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Friends of Community Media is a Kansas City nonprofit group working to enable citizens to create their own media and influence existing media. FCM promotes diversity both in media ownership and diversity in views that media portray to the public.